[1] Bar-Lev is an IDF reserve officer with the rank of colonel (Aluf mishne), who was commander of the Sayeret Matkal elite commando unit between 1984 and 1987.

He was drafted in 1971 and went on to command Israel's most elite special forces unit Sayeret Matkal and later the Jordan Valley Brigade.

After commanding Sayeret Matkal, Bar-Lev left the army again in 1987 in order to study for his master's degree in international relations at Tel Aviv University.

He also joined a group of reserve soldiers who, in 1978, wrote a letter to Prime Minister Menachem Begin urging him to sign a peace deal with Egypt.

After the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, Bar-Lev joined the organization "Generation of Peace", and within this framework, he founded the movement "Acharai", a slogan used in the IDF to mean "Follow me" and is used to galvanize a group towards a common goal.

[7] In 2013, Bar-Lev published "It's in Our Hands", a political initiative with proposals for both bilateral and independent moves that Israel should take to maintain its democratic and Jewish character.

To this end, Bar-Lev proposed a series of partial Israeli withdrawals from the West Bank aimed at minimizing the number of Palestinians living under IDF military rule and transferring responsibility for those areas to the PA.[8] Bar-Lev ran for the leadership of the Labor Party in 2017, and won 6.9% of the vote in the first round.